Reconstructions by Bradley Trumpfheller

“Where entanglements of anti-trans violence, the police state, and fascism script so much of common sense, in these resplendent poems, to settle into common sense won’t serve. Language twirls under Trumpfheller’s genius: ‘What does the body, / in language, amount to? Wind. Wind, being wound.’ These poems burst meaning open, charting a wild map of unruly kinships and queer alternatives. As its title promises, Reconstructions at once brings forward the past and makes possible different futures. This is a collection underwritten by the kind of rigorous witness that only desire can forge. But if language here is always gesturing toward an elsewhere, the speaker is not deluded by their own fantasy: ‘there are worlds where all of this is true / & we still do not survive.’ And yet, what is not is also what could be. Distance is desire’s condition. These poems thrive in the dazzle of that desire. I am in love with this book and, like any good love, Reconstructions charges me with reckoning and makes me want it.”  

—Claire Schwartz, author of Bound